Product Innovation

Too often, companies are sold on a target price for their product. They want to charge somewhere between what the market is willing to pay and what’s necessary to turn a profit — sometimes at four to five times the manufacturing cost. It’s tempting to take shortcuts in manufacturing and material selection to make more money. But poor quality comes at a cost...

You are about to develop a new product (or service, or process). However, your company may not have the skills or intellectual property to develop a part of it, so you are faced with the classic 'Make vs. Buy' decision. Do you have your own people develop that part, or do you use an external company for that?

Lean Startup or Stage-Gate? More often organizations are not choosing one or the other but taking the “and” option and integrating both into their product processes. The challenge is how to get them to play nice with each other and gain the benefits of each without losing something in the process.

While brand positioning isn’t particularly hard to explain, neither is describing how a plane flies. But the physics of rapid air flow over the wings is one thing; actually designing and piloting a plane is something else all together.

So, how does your Marketing serve your innovation? Does it define clearly and collaboratively? Does it integrate desirability, feasibility and viability in an optimal manner? Does it communicate with clarity and impact?

It takes a cross-sectional skill set to successfully implement good AI, and in order to do so, companies need to both understand their consumers’ motivations and capitalize on them using the right tools.

Be clear with your product marketing! Many companies and people confuse what they mean when discussing Value Propositions, Benefits, and Features. Be clear with your product marketing. Value Prop: Definition: A value proposition is the concise statement of the overarching solution to your customer’s problem. The solution then is not your product or its technical details, but the solution your ...

It could be about semantics. Or not. A pilot is not a prototype. It is my strong belief that innovation success derives from prototype initiatives that are carefully planned, properly funded or staffed, and supported from beginning to end by senior executives seeking breakthrough bounties.

Developing products in today’s market is a formidable task. Cycle times are shrinking and the pressure to do more with less is increasing. As the stress to get products to market faster increases, little room is left for learning through mistakes. But isn’t making mistakes an important part of the process?